SRLogo

Blog

Star Rapid’s blog aims to share our hard earned knowledge on manufacturing and product development. We hope these articles help you to optimize your product design and better understand the world of rapid prototyping, rapid tooling, 3D printing and low-volume manufacturing.

Design for Manufacturing

How Gate Design Affects Your Plastic Parts

The runner and gate system used in plastic injection molding is responsible for directing molten plastic from the nozzle of the molding machine into the cavity of the tool. The gate architecture and its location affects cycle times, tooling costs, lead times, the location of witness marks and many other

Read More »
Media

Star Receives Engineering Award from BUILD Magazine

With a team of dedicated engineers, machinists, designers and support staff, we’re honored to be named, along with our client Gate Labs, a winner of the BUILD Magazine Engineering Excellence Awards. The Engineering Excellence Awards 2017 recognizes various engineering disciplines and rewards firms and individuals for their often unheralded hard

Read More »
CNC Milling

Star Rapid Partners With German Tool Supplier Guhring

At Star, we are always looking for ways to improve speed and quality. One way we’ve done this is by partnering with the tool company Guhring to ensure that we provide only the finest tools when making CNC machined parts and rapid prototypes. Guhring is a German manufacturer of carbide

Read More »
Additive Manufacturing

What is Powder Bed Fusion for Metal 3D Printing?

There are so many new and emerging technologies being developed for metal 3D printing that it can be hard to keep up with a dizzying array of acronyms, machines and applications. One of the most common types of metal 3D printing being used at the moment is powder bed fusion. Here’s

Read More »
Materials

The Story of the Blackest Color Ever Made

Colors are all around us, from the pictures we paint to the clothes we wear. But, have you ever thought about where colors come from? Today, we’re going to discuss the science behind color transmission and absorption, as well as why it’s important for new product design and development. Understanding

Read More »
CNC

6 Early Inventions in the History of CNC Machining

All CNC machines, regardless of their size or complexity, make use of the same few technical innovations – some more than one-hundred years old. By tracing the history of these innovations we can follow the trends that led to the development of the first numerically controlled machines in the late

Read More »